Death in the Neo-Con Family

Another member of the Axis of Evil expired today in the explosion of a North Korean nuclear cooling tower, and Washington mourners are taking it hard. Dick Cheney, inconsolable, has retreated into stony silence but John Bolton, voluble as ever, is carrying on about the "shameful" loss of another Neo-Con offspring.

The Vice President, grief-stricken at the terrorism de-listing of North Korea, reportedly left a meeting of foreign-policy experts after being asked about the news.

“I’m not going to be the one to announce this decision,” Cheney said, pointing at himself before departing. “You need to address your interest in this to the State Department.”

With Evil on life support in Iraq, the loss of another Conservative whipping boy leaves only Iran as a survivor of the triplets born during President Bush's State of the Union speech in January 2002.

If Israel makes good on Bolton's prediction of an attack on Tehran after our November elections, the Bush Administration may leave office in January childless, sloganwise.

Fighting Words

What would Monday mornings be these days without some fresh William Kristol absurdity on the New York Times OpEd page?

Today the accident-prone pundit chides Barack Obama for a "sin of omission" in a commencement speech urging graduates to enter public service without mentioning the military as an option:

"(A)t an elite Northeastern college campus, Obama obviously felt no need to disturb the placid atmosphere of easy self-congratulation. He felt no need to remind students of a different kind of public service--one that entails more risks than community organizing. He felt no need to tell the graduating seniors in the lovely groves of Middletown that they should be grateful to their peers who were far away facing dangers on behalf of their country."

Should they also be grateful for the armchair strategists who sent them there to prove a Neo-Con theory that turned out to be devastatingly wrong? Kristol and his cohorts have never been any closer to the fighting than a think tank, from which their guru, Dick Cheney, after multiple Vietnam deferments, led his toy soldiers into helping George Bush lie our way into Iraq.

Somebody at the Times should take away Kristol's wooden sword.

Ending an Era of American Impotence

Those ubiquitous commercials for Cialis, Levitra, etc. may be telling us more about our national psyche than just the state of the male libido.

Put together with surveys showing sagging confidence in the institutions of power, they present a picture of American impotence--to either win or get out of a hopeless war, to rebuild after a natural disaster or deal with hard times. (Is Congress' stimulus bill any more than a weak dose of economic Viagra?)

Years of a smirking, swaggering George W. Bush who has failed to perform where it counts have taken a toll on American life. To compensate, he has surrounded himself with Cheney's Neo-Cons, whose judgement has been clouded by seven-year erections for which they have failed to find satisfaction or seek medical attention.

Now the political party that gave us all this is offering an aging macho figure who promises to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell but can't seem to find his way around the factions in Iraq.

In offering a non-belligerent younger man and/or a woman, Democrats may be onto something--empowering Americans with the sense that real strength comes, not from blustering and bullying, but using empathy and understanding to form real connections in the world.

We don't need pills for that.

A Few Words From Bush's Gunga Dim

William Kristol, the Neo-Con water carrier, finds inspiration today in the poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling, via George Orwell, a literary confluence that boggles the 21st century mind.

From an Orwell essay on Kipling discovered in a used-book store, Kristol finds a parallel for today's Democrats with the British "permanent and pensioned opposition," whose quality of thought deteriorated because it was "not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.”

Modestly asking our leave to "vulgarize the implications of Orwell’s argument a bit," the New York Times' newest sage adapts the wisdom of the author of "White Man's Burden" to belabor opposition to the war in Iraq and illegal eavesdropping as the acts of decadent Democrats who have forgotten how to take responsibility for the use of power.

Cheerfully ignoring the fate of the British Empire that Kipling celebrated, Kristol advises Bush detractors to step up and emulate those men of action who muddled up the Middle East a century ago.

He ends with a more recent historical reference: "To govern is to choose, a Democrat of an earlier generation, John F. Kennedy, famously remarked. Is this generation of Democrats capable of governing?"

Kristol may want to take note of something JFK also said, "You can't beat brains."

Dumb and Dumber in Iraq

It took two kinds of stupidity to get us into the war--the Bush-Cheney Neo-Con brand and Saddam Hussein's. We get a closer look at the latter this weekend from the FBI agent who interrogated him after his capture.

Shrewd Saddam was so sure the US wouldn't invade, he told George Piro, that he refused to let inspectors verify that he had no WMD in order to fake out Iran.

"For him," Piro discloses on Sixty Minutes, "it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam" to "prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq."

During the run-up to the war, it was hard enough to reconcile George Bush's picture of the murderous dictator planning to send us a mushroom cloud with the buffoon on a balcony firing a rifle into the Baghdad air.

Even more baffling was our certainty that the invasion would be a "cakewalk" and our eagerness to send American troops into battle against nuclear and chemical weapons that could cause massive casualties.

As a reward for his bluffing and our being wrong about his WMD, Saddam ended up at the end of a rope, and we ended up with an endless occupation.

"Dumbest Guy on the Planet" Explains It All

At a Neo-Con reunion last night, Don Rumsfeld's Three Stooges, who planned the war in Iraq, got together to blame the mess there on somebody else, L. Paul Bremer, who ran the occupation for the first two years.

Former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith told the faithful at the American Enterprise Institute that his plan was not "to be around for many, many months" but that Bremer overruled him, thereby putting the US in today's stalemate.

Feith, labeled by Gen. Tommy Franks as "the dumbest effing guy on the planet," was introduced by former colleague Richard Perle while Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank lover, sat up front and agreed that Feith was "pretty much on the mark."

After hearing about the talk, Bremer told a reporter that Feith's "argument isn't with me," that President Bush told him before leaving for Baghdad to "take our time setting up an interim administration."

In reviewing George Tenet's memoir for the Wall Street Journal, Feith accused the former CIA Director of making up stories about how we got into Iraq. With his own book due for publication is March, Feith is getting a head start on fabricating his own.

The N.I.E. Mystery-Riddle-Enigma

Yesterday's news about Iran's nuclear weapons or, more accurately, lack thereof is an event that recalls Winston Churchill's description of the Soviet Union as a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.

Even by Bush Administration standards of incompetence, illogic and intrigue, there is no sane explanation for the President's continuing public insistence that Iran come clean about weapons that his National Security Adviser now admits Bush has known for "months" do not exist.

Unless...

Going back to the 2003 Cheney gang massaging of intelligence about Iraq's WMDs that prompted Colin Powell to mislead the UN, the questions arise (1) Is Stephen Hadley trying to hide the fact that Bush was being similarly duped or (2) Did the desire for another invasion lead Bush and Cheney once again to hide evidence that would destroy the rationale for doing it until the intelligence agencies themselves finally rebelled against doing another George Tenet?

There are other, less likely possibilities. Did Congressional overseers threaten to blow the whistle (they deny it)? Did somebody finally wise up to the fact that the murky exile-terrorist group, Mujahedeen-e-Khalq or MEK, credited with "helping expose Iran’s secret nuclear program,” has been no more reliable than Ahmed Chalabi's grifters were in Iraq?

As conservatives scramble to explain that Iran stopped trying to produce nuclear weapons in 2003 because they were terrified by our invasion of Iraq (the most Hail Mary of passes in a gone game), the maddening opaqueness of what happened this week to derail Bush's milk run to World War III remains a 21st century mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.

Fourteen months from now, maybe we can give up playing these heart-stopping Neo-Con games and start living again in a sane world.